{"id":15076,"date":"2009-12-28T01:01:31","date_gmt":"2009-12-28T05:01:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.firstthings.com\/blogs\/theanchoress\/?p=15076"},"modified":"2017-03-10T23:05:27","modified_gmt":"2017-03-10T23:05:27","slug":"the-lives-they-had","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theanchoress\/2009\/12\/28\/the-lives-they-had\/","title":{"rendered":"The lives they had"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I am awestruck over these two lives<\/strong> profiled in the NY Times Magazine<\/a>; their stories included in the magazine\u2019s look at notable deaths in 2009:<\/p>\n

Martha Mason and Maurizio Montalbini: They Lived Apart <\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1948, polio came for the children of Willard and Euphra Mason of Lattimore, N.C. First it took 13-year-old Gaston, killing him in days. His sister, Martha, grief-stricken, terrified, knew on the day of her brother\u2019s funeral that her aching muscles meant she was sick, too. She decided she would not go to bed: she would outrun the disease. But she could fight sleep for only so long, and she woke to her weeping mother mopping her forehead. At a hospital an hour away, she heard her mother say, when told to go home, that she had no home to go to. Instead, Mrs. Mason got a job at the hospital. When her daughter was transferred to another facility, she got a job there too.<\/p>\n

An iron lung looks like an enormous metal coffin or a 19th-century rocket ship: only its occupant\u2019s head is left outside, a tight seal around the neck. A series of pumps inflate and deflate the lungs. For Martha Mason, age 11, now a quadriplegic, the iron lung was a rocket ship home. After a year in the hospital, doctors sent her back to Lattimore in a machine paid for by the March of Dimes and told her parents to make her last year alive a happy one.<\/p>\n

One day she noticed a copy of Marcus Aurelius\u2019s \u201cMeditations\u201d on a bookshelf and read it. \u201cTake away the complaint, \u2018I have been harmed,\u2019 and the harm is taken away,\u201d it said. \u201cSometimes I pretended that my brother had left \u2018Meditations\u2019 there for me,\u201d she wrote later. She lived that year, and the next. Her high-school teachers brought lessons to her every afternoon; her parents moved with her to the campus of a local junior college, and then to Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, where she attended class by intercom and majored in English. She graduated first in all three classes. Flat on her back, she\u2019d outrun the disease after all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n


\nRead on, and marvel;<\/strong> I wonder if I would dare to give a dinner party while in an iron lung? I wonder why I do not give more dinner parties, now.<\/p>\n

I love the Marcus Aurelius quote:<\/p>\n

\u201cTake away the complaint, \u2018I have been harmed,\u2019 and the harm is taken away,\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What sane, healthy advise in a world where everyone is perpetually offended and hurt. And how merciful it is both to others and to ourselves. I have put it on my wall.<\/p>\n

We hear a lot of talk about \u201cquality of life\u201d issues<\/strong> -they go hand in hand with \u201cObamacare\u201d issues and pro-life issues. My bottom line is always this: one person\u2019s life may seem wasted, or unenviable, or horrifically difficult to another, but it is the life that person has -in all of its difficulties, challenges and \u201cdeficiencies,\u201d it is still the life that person has; he or she should be allowed to live it. If we are to err, let it be on the side of life.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am awestruck over these two lives profiled in the NY Times Magazine; their stories included in the magazine\u2019s look at notable deaths in 2009: Martha Mason and Maurizio Montalbini: They Lived Apart In 1948, polio came for the children of Willard and Euphra Mason of Lattimore, N.C. First it took 13-year-old Gaston, killing him […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":112,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-of-lifedeath"],"yoast_head":"\nThe lives they had<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I am awestruck over these two lives profiled in the NY Times Magazine; their stories included in the magazine's look at notable deaths in 2009: Martha\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theanchoress\/2009\/12\/28\/the-lives-they-had\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The lives they had\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I am awestruck over these two lives profiled in the NY Times Magazine; 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